Inspector Morse Returns in ‘Endeavour,’ a Prequel




The dead walk the earth this Sunday night — and on PBS, no less.


It is a testament to the popularity of Inspector Morse, the British television character created 25 years ago by the novelist Colin Dexter, the producer Ted Childs and the actor John Thaw, that after he was killed off with great ceremony in 2000, it was thought necessary to bring him back. That exhumation has been accomplished with a prequel, “Endeavour,” which opens the new season of “Masterpiece Mystery!”


Sunday night’s episode, shown in Britain in January, was the pilot for a series that has been picked up by the ITV network for an additional four installments; presumably these will arrive on PBS in due course. Fans of the detective will already know that the title is Morse’s given name, which he kept secret and which was revealed near the end of the original series’s 33-episode run.


“Inspector Morse” was distinctive for three reasons: Mr. Thaw’s idiosyncratic, often unsympathetic performance; the testy relationship between his misanthropic, snobby, eternally disappointed Morse and Kevin Whately’s earnest, proletarian Sergeant Lewis; and the romantic Oxford locations where the two solved murders between bouts of bickering and heavy drinking.


“Endeavour” can trade on only the last of those, so there is an abundance of scenes featuring those same quadrangles and towers. Luckily for the producers, these landmarks look the same now as they would have in the 1960s, when “Endeavour” is set.


Shaun Evans (“The Take”) plays the young Endeavour Morse, a constable from a nearby town who is taken to Oxford to help with the case of a missing girl. True to form, he is already unhappy — we first see him laboriously typing a letter of resignation.


Mr. Evans is believable as the proto-Morse, highlighting the character’s distraction — his mind is always running ahead of events, sometimes down the wrong paths — and his self-righteous arrogance while projecting an energy that will eventually wither into the lassitude of the middle-aged inspector.


He wisely avoids the trap of trying to do a John Thaw imitation, but around him the show’s producers have laid on the “Inspector Morse” associations pretty thickly. There is the love of opera, of course — a key element in the plot — and a loving gaze at a red Jaguar. There is a hopeless infatuation with an unattainable woman. An early clue leads Endeavour to the Oxford suburb of Jericho, where the first Morse episode was set. Snippets of the composer Barrington Pheloung’s original Morse code theme music are heard.


Some of the time and attention lavished on nostalgia — perhaps wisely, from a ratings standpoint — could have been devoted to the pilot’s murder mystery plot, which starts off strong (with echoes of the roughly contemporary Profumo sex scandal) but comes to a rushed, melodramatic and fairly preposterous conclusion.


That ending mars what is otherwise a handsome and well-written effort, with good supporting performances by Jack Ashton, as a sergeant antagonized by the uppity new constable, and Roger Allam as the inspector who recognizes Endeavour’s talent and is set up to serve as his mentor in the future series.


Whether the “Endeavour” pilot, which drew an impressive 8.2 million viewers in Britain, will delight the die-hard “Inspector Morse” fan is questionable, though.


Beyond the easy pleasure of the Morse allusions, the tone and texture of the new work are substantially different: It’s blander, stiffer and more conventional, like many other well-made British period pieces. In hindsight, the original series may be overrated, but it had an acid tang that you remembered. At this point, “Endeavour” is more like ginger beer.


Masterpiece Mystery!


Endeavour


On PBS stations on Sunday night at 9 (check local listings).


Produced by Mammoth Screen Ltd. for ITV and Masterpiece. Directed by Colm McCarthy; written by Russell Lewis, based on characters created by Colin Dexter; Michele Buck and Damien Timmer, executive producers; Rebecca Eaton, executive producer for Masterpiece.


WITH: Shaun Evans (Detective Constable Endeavour Morse), Roger Allam (Detective Inspector Fred Thursday), Richard Lintern (Dr. Rowan Stromming), Charlie Creed-Miles (Teddy Samuels), Patrick Malahide (Richard Lovell), Jack Ashton (Detective Constable Ian McLeash) and James Bradshaw (Dr. Max Debryn).